[P5fRxh5kUvp2th]

It's not a job, it's a role, one that senior developers take on all the time.

It gets turned into a job and the result is business people constantly bitching about why everything is slow and what DOES get done is never what they wanted.

The phone game is real.

[danielmarkbruce]

It's a job of many roles and it's a crazy difficult job to do well at. I'd never do it again. Engineering feels like a cake walk in comparison.

[P5fRxh5kUvp2th]

The reason you found it so hard is because you weren't doing the implementation, which is why software developers should be taking on that role.

At that point you're a glorified translator hoping that both sides are understanding each other perfectly. And what's worse is they both speak English!

[danielmarkbruce]

Translating between who? I don't think we share the same experiences with companies, roles etc, so we might be talking past each other. Product is a pretty ill-defined role.

[P5fRxh5kUvp2th]

between business needs and how it gets implemented.

Companies that do this took 3 roles and smashed them into 1.

- marketing fit - business analyst (aka domain experts) - technical implementation

The reason you see people talking about how hard it is for product is because product gets to interface with the business and has an understanding of the problems and the proposed solutions. They try to tell technical to implement with no real understanding of both, due the reality of the phone game it's never implemented as they want, and they get frustrated.

The solution is to stop trying to make technical the tech equivalent of ditch diggers.

Yes, if you want a ditch dug it's relatively easy to communicate that to someone. Software aint ditches.

So while product couldn't begin to start implementing themselves, technical can absolutely be having those conversations with business.

[danielmarkbruce]

I can see what you are saying if one is the environment you describe.

I've never worked somewhere where eng was treated like ditch diggers. But I've also never worked anywhere where this "business analyst" actually existed. If you build products for many customers there is no such person, because different customers need slightly different things and you have to pick a position v competitors.

Maybe try changing environments? Not everywhere works as you describe.

[wittycardio]

Then youve never done any real engineering lol. People who say this tend to work in less technical types of "software development"

[danielmarkbruce]

Most people who have done real engineering and real product jobs will tell you PM is a harder job to do well.

There is more pressure, less control, more uncertainty, more people to keep happy, more ambiguity. And the number of context switches is high. One has to be highly organized too. Crazy difficult to do well. Very easy to do poorly.

It is a lot easier to be a bad PM than an engineer, I'll grant you that. And most PMs aren't great.

[P5fRxh5kUvp2th]

What you mean is it's extremely difficult not to produce shit software with a setup like this, even though paradoxically the theory is that this should produce higher quality software.

The reason for this is something called tacit knowledge. The only way for a developer to be successful is if they have the same level of understanding that product does. Since they don't, product needs to be the one implementing. Since neither happens, you get shit software.

The solution is either product starts implementing or software developers stop being treated as line workers.

product used to be three roles that worked together. software dev, business analyst, and marketing. And depending on the size of the company, business analyst and marketing often means working directly with business because that's who collaborates between those two.

There is no value-add in product, the theory has proven out to be untrue.

Give it another 10-20 years and we'll be reading articles about how the "smart" companies are doing away with product and giving it back to the other roles and asking them to do something crazy like talk to each other.

[danielmarkbruce]

"working with business" suggests we must be talking about different situations.

I'm talking about a company building software products they sell, eg an enterprise software product like salesforce, google cloud, aws, splunk etc. Not internal software or software built for a specific client.

[P5fRxh5kUvp2th]

It's all the same, someone has a need and you give them a solution.

That need is either driven by business wanting to improve the software or by technical wanting to improve the software. product doesn't belong in there.

product will never identify that a technical change will enable new things, for example. The ones who can do that aren't allowed in the conversation.